Giving Hats to Iguanas With MaskerAid
A couple weeks ago, professional podcaster and occasional app developer Casey Liss released his latest app called MaskerAid — an app that (on the tin, at least) is for obscuring faces with emoji overlays. Launch-day coverage of the app was extensive, including from 512 Pixels, iMore, 9to5Mac, and of course Casey's own blog post.
All of these post highlighted MaskerAid's main feature of automatically detecting faces in an image using iOS magic and eclipsing each with an emoji — letting you share photos of your children more privately on Instagram and the like. All of these posts touched briefly on some alternative use cases for MaskerAid — things like adding a tasteful 💩 emoji or censoring other body parts in a particular photo. But how many of them traveled all the way to Cancún to test out how MaskerAid holds up to the challenge of giving an iguana a cool hat?
🎵 Lizard Faces on Parade 🎵
I joke, of course, when I say that I went all the way to Cancún to review MaskerAid — my wife and I have had this resort vacation booked since Christmas, and during our stay we discovered that Cancún is simply rife with photogenic iguanas. Behold their majestic poses:
It became my project between trips to the beach and reading sessions poolside to find and photograph any nearby iguanas, but then after a few days I realized what would make these dainty dragons all the more delightful: hats!
Although MaskerAid is billed mostly as an app to provide privacy to your kids on Instagram, it also excels as a straight-up emoji annotation app. After the $2.99 in-app purchase, I was able to add whatever emoji I wanted — from top hats to trumpets — to the idling iguanas of the Riviera Maya. Unfortunately, the iOS face detection baked into MaskerAid has not been expanded to detect reptiles (yet), so every emoji had to be carefully placed by hand. All of this iguana iconography made me notice how challenging it is to place small emoji on small subjects (usually background lizards). When dragging an emoji of any size, it and it's surrounding "container" become slightly transparent to make placing it just right over a face (or snout) much easier to do. However, when the emoji you're working with is smaller than the tip of your finger you can't see what you're doing and have to rely on trial and error. It would be nice if at a certain size the classic cursor magnifying glass from the iOS text editor was added to the emoji container that let you see "passed" your finger while placing a particularly tiny emoji.
Of course, there are far more emoji than just hats...and there were far more than just iguanas at our resort! Getting creative with MaskerAid seemed to me the best way to test out its utility as a simple emoji annotator, and maybe find a few more suggestions for improvement.
Other than the issue of small emoji being difficult to place, I also had an issue with rescaling any emoji also resetting that emoji's rotation state back to "normal" for that emoji. I often found it easier to rotate first and scale second...only to have my careful work undone by the app. I'm unsure if this is a bug, but I hope it can be fixed in a future update.
🎵 Let the Spectacle Astound You 🎵
Overall, MaskerAid does exactly what it promises to: adding emoji to obscure part of an image (or in my case, enhance it) with ease. It's not a complicated app, nor is it entirely original in what it does. Twitter and Instagram, for instance, both let you add emoji annotations to images before posting them — which in a way does undercut MaskerAid's titular purpose. That said, I'm a big fan of the single-purpose app — a tool that does one thing and does it well. If I want to add an emoji to an image (for privacy or for a punchline), do I want to...tweet it? and then save the image from Twitter? No, I want a quick and simple way to add the emoji and then send the image where I please. It was interesting hearing Casey discuss the reception to MaskerAid on this week's ATP, especially his surprise at all of the interesting and unexpected ways people are using the app. Despite its simplicity and its single-purpose nature, I enjoyed using MaskerAid while on my trip. Showing my silly edits to my wife while sitting on the beach (especially the gecko wearing a backpack) was fun for us — and given where we were, "fun" was a high bar to hit!
You can give MaskerAid a try for yourself — whether for anonymizing a photo or anthropomorphizing a gecko — by downloading it for free on the app store.